The first time I
met Kim Miles was when I was casting for one of my no-budget features.In between all the plastic Hollywood wannabes
that waltzed into my audition headquarters (my home), there shuffled in an unusual
figure, spindly, with unkempt hair, a
little edgy, and more interested in conversing philosophically than actually
auditioning for me.When he (Kim was
male at that point) left, I thought to myself – well, there’s an interesting
person.I couldn’t cast him for the film
though, and I thought no more about him after that.

A few years
later, I was watching a program of short films somewhere, and suddenly realised
that a couple of the shorts I was watching, which were quite inventive and
playful, were actually made by the very same person, Kim Miles.I smiled and thought to myself – well, that’s
an interesting development.I walked
home and decided that I must hunt Kim down, and I did, watching more of his
films, culminating in me programming a mini retrospective of his work for the
Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2006.(You can actually see the program notes and list of films here.)

In those years,
the mid-to-late ‘00s, he would come to my place to borrow books and videos,
and, over some time, I saw him transform into a woman.Again, an interesting development!(Well, not a “woman” as such, more
“transgender”, and, as she informs me herself, these days the more correct term
is “gender diverse”.)Clearly, Kim was
an interesting filmmaker in more ways than one!

Shooting forward
to now, 2018, we can see the ups and downs of her filmmaking career.It’s not easy making a film, any film, and to
do it at the true independent level (i.e. without any funding whatsoever) for
years and years can be a gruelling, difficult task.

The Purpose of Life and the Nature of Death

The World Really is W

It’s an
impressive body of work.From 2002 to
2011, she made 22 short films. She then made 2 “web series” (composed of 5 or 6
short segments each) between 2012 and 2014.But then she came to a standstill, until this year, 2018, where she has
shot and is currently editing a film entitled Exit Wounds.

Kim Miles is
punky, and surrealistic, but also experimental and whimsical.It’s an extraordinary combination, making her
quite unique in the Melbourne indie film scene.Her masterpiece is Sick to the Vitals (2005), a tour-de-force of alienation and redemption.It’s quite astonishing to see her get to that
point within just a couple of years of picking up a camera, from her early
fumblings such as the personal diary film Love
and Death (2002) and the capturing life on the streets document Living and Art (2002).But she was a quick learner, being a
searcher, a seeker.Here was someone who
was not going to die wondering.

You can see her
steps:the comedy of the karate parody Suzi Wong’s Big Day Out (2002);the semi-naked performance art (Kim himself)
piece The Purpose of Life and the Nature
of Death (2002);her first attempts
at slow and fast motions (which are always inventive) in Proportion of Australian males with erectile problems: nearly 40% (2003);her first attempts at gathering ensembles and
fucking around with them in I thought I
wasn’t (2003) and TheWorld Really is
W (2004);her first attempts at
abstraction in Terra Australis (2004);and her first attempts at
perversity and surreality in Top Speed of
a Rabbit – 72 KPH (2004) and To
Master a Long Good Night (2005).

These first
dozen or so short films she made in her first four years of filmmaking are some
of the most imaginative filmmaking I’ve seen in Australian cinema.You can see that her brain is wired
differently to the average filmmaker.An
auto-didact, but with a love of the cinema, she constantly looks for the
off-beat thing to do.The scripts are
loose.It is more about the inspiration
in the moment of shooting, and, in particular, the moment of editing.There’s a mix of actors with non-actors.There’s a mix of punk music, jazz music, and
natural sounds.The colour is
heightened, the framings eclectic, the mood wacky.And the reality gets bent, always: it goes
slow, it goes fast, it freezes, it goes backward.Everything they teach you not to do in film
school, Kim does.(I can’t call her
“Miles” – her films are too individual, too human, for her to be called by her
surname.)

Top Speed of a Rabbit – 72 KPH

Top Speed of a Rabbit – 72 KPH

Where does one
begin?There’s inventiveness
everywhere.I particularly love The World Really is W, probably Kim’s
finest ensemble piece.Ostensibly set in
an office, the dozen or so men (and one woman) are in their shirts and ties,
bored, and the rhythmic punky music catches them in weird poses, and speeds
them up, and slows them down, and stops and loops them, and then lets them
dance crazily, to some Casio-dance music.It’s off-beat and hilarious.Top Speed of a Rabbit – 72 KPH then
takes one of the office workers (Peter Lesley) to a bar, where he picks up two
women, and they go back to his place for a wild party, and proceedings are on
the verge of perversity, and then they flip surrealistically, as Kim presents
us with her homage to Cocteau.You just
marvel at her dexterity.Many of these
early short films are surprising and delightful.

These first
short films of hers were the launchpad into Sick
to the Vitals.They were all 10
minutes or under.All of a sudden, she
attempted a 20 minute film, with an actual narrative premise to it.The short films were inventive sketches;Sick to
the Vitals was more like a grand narrative and statement.And it came out brilliantly.It has a gravitas that the previous films
lack, as it charts the rise and fall and redemption of a female singer, who,
having won Australian Idol, is now struggling with her fame, and is drug-addled
most of the time.

The film is a
collection of bravura set pieces.The
opening scene is intentionally banal, two girls at a shopping mall talking
about buying lipstick and clothes, and the film freezes on them and then morphs
into its extraordinary first set-piece, thrusting us into the dark (literally)
world of its heroine, with the drugs, the sex, the crazy fans.Kim’s master stroke here is the use of the
dissonant music of Sonic Youth throughout the film.It gives a power to the film, as our heroine
slips in and out of consciousness, wild nightmares and sublime dreams taking
possession of her, away from prosaic reality.But there is a stunning moment of redemption for her in the last scene,
as she literally uses the power of rock’n’roll to express how she’s “feeling
better” with her life.

But any
description I offer here would not be able to do justice to the power of this
film, which for me is one of the best Australian films of all time.So, have a look for yourselves.If there’s one Kim Miles film you’re going to
see, this is it:

Seemingly at the
height of her powers with Sick to the
Vitals, Kim used this energy to create two striking shorts immediately
afterwards – Untitled (2006) and Four Women at a Bar (2006).Continuing the dream stylisations from Sick to the Vitals, Untitled is set in an “other” zone, totally stylised, glowing
rooms, men and women as “figures”, exchanging strange looks and violent
jabs.It’s eerie and unusual, Kim at her
experimental best.Four Women at a Bar also has heightened, glowing visuals, taking a
prosaic situation (four women sitting at a bar, with a barman serving them) and
transforming it into an other-worldly event.The women are sped up at one point, and their voices are also sped up,
as they bitch about this and that.Unfortunately, the sped up voices are an experiment that fails, as Kim
can’t transcend the comic feel they produce.Otherwise, it’s another quirky delight from Kim, complete with dance
music.

Her next films
are down-beat and deflated.John (2009) uses the same fast motion
voices we heard in Four Women at a Bar,
and again the comic nature of the voices stifles the film.The film is a mock documentary on the making
of a film, the audition process, as Kim (playing herself) guides a number of
male actors in some taped auditions.It’s an experiment that doesn’t quite resonate, self-reflexivity
seemingly not Kim’s forte.But 9 Years Since Polly Passed is even grimmer:
in B&W realistic tableaux, we see a couple bicker and act ugly with each
other, in an endless display of their twisted love for each other.Kim seems to be aiming for something else
though, not just pure realism, as the slow but sprightly jazz music pushes
proceedings into another area, but ... it’s not clear where.It seems Kim is expressing sympathy,
tenderness, even whimsy, for her characters, but, it falls flat.

Four Women at a Bar

9 Years Since Polly Passed

But the next film
is a triumph.It looks like Kim decided
to push herself again, with another “longer” film, another 20 minute one.11
Minutes on Sunday (2009) is a breakthrough, a breath of fresh air, as if
Kim decided to “just relax”, and let the film come to her, and us, the
gratefully accepting audience.The
quality I’ve mentioned a few times now is at the fore here: whimsy.It’s like a Jacques Tati film almost, a
whimsical observation piece of a number of different people, over one Sunday morning.The reality isn’t distorted – we see everyday
life, everyday people, but with little touches of surreality and
absurdity.Kudos to the editor (Kim has
worked with several different editors over the journey), Michael Wormald, who
masterfully structures the elements, with judicious bits of jazz (but also
pleasing natural sounds), rotating the different sections around each
other.It’s a joyful film, one that
dances freely.It smiles at us.

Two more short
films are made in this period:Funny Guy (2010) and A Hesitant Move (2011).It’s clear that as Kim gets more experience,
she becomes more sophisticated as a director, but the downside of this is that
the films can become more conventional.These two films, and 9 Years Since
Polly Passed, could have been made by anyone, with their “clever” scripts
and “accomplished” acting.Okay, they’re
superior conventional films, due to their edge, but they are a far cry from the
early, anarchic, punky Kim short films like The
World is Really W or The Purpose of
Life and the Nature of Death.

11 Minutes on Sunday

Tiger and Dog

Sensing this, I
think Kim tried something different next, to get her creative juices flowing
again: the “web series”.With this
format, she could leave the narratives open-ended, as she created different
“episodes” around certain characters and situations.Tiger
and Dog (2012-3) and Melbourne Girls (2014) emerged from this period, in full gory colour (after a number of B&W
shorts), and indeed with a more punky “freedom” to them.At the very least, they are entertaining and
engaging, if not particularly surreal.

And now we await
her “comeback” film, after some years of inactivity, the enticingly-titled Exit Wounds (2018).It promises to be another "long" film for her (over 20 minutes).That augurs well, as every time she tries a
“big” film, she comes up with something brilliant.

Kim Miles – I
salute you. There’s no-one quite like
you in the Australian independent film scene.

Bill Mousoulis is a Greek-Australian independent filmmaker since 1982, and occasional writer on film.